9/21/1998 @ 12:00AM

Gearheads wanted

WHERE HAVE ALL THE skilled machinists gone? There are 400,000 of them in the U.S. but their average age is 50 and a good portion are on the edge of retirement. Yet only 15,000 youngsters come into the trade every year, and right now 30,000 jobs in the field are unfilled.

These are not lousy jobs. Average annual earnings for a skilled machinist are $55,000, but somehow youngsters are turned off by the blue-collar image. Skilled manufacturing is rarely encouraged in high schools, which tend to push students into four-year colleges, having persuaded the kids that without that college sheepskin they are condemned to hamburger flipping at McDonald’s.

The $40 billion machine tool industry makes the vital components and tools for lathes and drill presses that work metal into parts for automobiles, airplanes, computers and industrial machinery. It is the very heart of American manufacturing.

So companies are recruiting hard, and at least some youngsters are listening. Travis Dommer, 23, certainly is. He’s one of 42 apprentices at Remmele Engineering, Inc. in St. Paul, Minn. Dommer got interested while pushing a broom after school at a local machine shop in Wausau, Wis. While half of his friends chose college, he went to technical school. At Remmele he makes rocket engine components for Boeing’s Rocketdyne division. Within a few years he’ll be earning more than $20 an hour. And with nice perks, too.

Nor is that as high as he can hope to go. Take 44-year-old former Remmele apprentice David Baumgartner, who worked his way up from mill operator to manufacturing manager for Remmele’s large-parts operation.

He makes $75,000 a year — 27% more than the average for college graduates his age. He owns a 16-foot fishing boat and five horses in Elk River, Minn., where $75,000 a year goes a long, long way.

Gerald Sommers, cofounder and president of Courtesy Corp. in Buffalo Grove, Ill., is another success story. Courtesy’s machines produce plastic molds that form everything from trigger sprayers to pregnancy- test applicators. Sommers, 57, did two years of college before starting his apprenticeship.

“I wasn’t the type for college. I was more of a doer,” he says. While working as a moldmaker at a small shop in the Chicago suburbs, he moonlighted, building vises in his partner’s garage. After four months he and his partner rented a building and bought a $3,500 manual milling machine. One of their first big jobs: making the mold for a liquid- margarine spout. This year sales should top $200 million. Sommers has a 50% stake in the company.

The industry wants more youngsters to harken to such stories. To attract talent, John Effmann, VP of marketing at Cincinnati Milacron, persuaded the Association for Manufacturing Technology to host a youth summit at its international show in Chicago this month.

Effmann hopes to attract 5,000 kids within a 300-mile radius of the show. Companies will pay to bus them in. There they will see gadgets like water-jet metal cutters and giant spider-shaped machines called hexapods that can mill square blocks into spheres.

Harrisburg, Pa.-based AMP, Inc. is running local TV infomercials advertising gleaming factories and complex, high-speed equipment. One 30-second spot aired during the season finale of Seinfeld. To grab the younger set, AMP is producing an educational video featuring Nascar drivers who came from tool-and-die backgrounds.

At its space-transportation-systems facility in Los Angeles, Boeing invites high school teachers to use software to draw sheet-metal outlines of the Orbiter space shuttle. The images are fed to a computer- controlled tool that instantly cuts the shapes before their eyes. Boeing hopes the sessions will persuade the teachers to steer kids into manufacturing careers.

Last year Federal-Mogul Corp. sent Lane LeBrun, head of its local apprentice program, to a Chicago high school to teach a metalworking class once a month. Maynor Vidal, 18, was so taken with LuBron’s tales from the shop that after graduation he applied for an entry-level maintenance job. Next year he’ll be an apprentice. Says Vidal: “I was thinking about going to aviation school, but I really like metalworking.

It changed all my plans.”

That spirit unfortunately hasn’t yet infected young women, many of whom apparently still view tool-and-die work as a grungy job involving heavy lifting. Shops do try to recruit women, emphasizing the user- friendly environments. “But our results are pretty dismal,” says Richard Walker, education director at the National Tooling and Machining Association.

Some kids shun the trade because they think it is prone to layoffs.

It really isn’t. Unlike semiskilled machine operators, precision machinists can apply their trade almost anywhere. When business slowed at Wheeling, Ill.-based Spectrum Manufacturing in 1992, for example, production manager Ryan Timm got the pink slip. Then a 26-year-old machinist and father of twin baby boys, Timm drove down the street to Swiss EDM Wirecut, Inc. He went inside to ask about a job and the company hired him on the spot. He was unemployed for all of 15 minutes.